Landowners’ fears surface

Gas drilling abruptly upends family’s lives

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first in a two-part series examining
the effects of oil and natural gas drilling in eastern Wise and
western Denton counties.

WISE COUNTY - A bit of yellow tape dangled from a short wooden
stake in front of Christine Ruggiero's house on Star Shell Road
that September morning, less than a year ago.

The subtle signal meant something to someone.

On her 20-minute drive to work, Ruggiero hoped that what she saw
wouldn't become what she feared. DRC/David Minton Christine and Tim
Ruggiero, shown on their property in Wise County in February, were
surprised when an Aruba Petroleum crew came onto their land in
September, taking down their horse fence and bulldozing their
pasture. View larger More photos Photo store

Aruba Petroleum had already dug up several acres of land on the
neighboring 38-acre homestead, drilling a new gas well on Pat and
Jim Headen's front lawn.

Angry and upset, her husband, Tim Ruggiero, had painted two
protest signs and hung them by the road. A few days later, someone
made an addition to one of the signs. Between a crude depiction of
male and female genitalia, the vandal scrawled "you're next." ALSO
ONLINE

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Investigation
Report

Christine Ruggiero, 43, dropped off her 9-year-old daughter at
school in Denton and, after arriving at the employee benefits
consulting group where she works in Highland Village, she took a
minute to call up the permits section of the Texas Railroad
Commission Web site.

Ruggiero called her husband.

Sept. 16: Still no permit, she told him.

Then her phone rang. Her neighbor, Pat Headen, had just returned
home for lunch and seen pieces of the Ruggieros' horse fence in a
pile. Near a crew and a bulldozer, she saw one of Ruggiero's
horses.

"Christine, did you know they've got a bulldozer out there?"
Headen said.

"No," Ruggiero said. "I'll be right home."

She returned to find several acres of their 10-acre parcel
stripped bare. At the center of the chaos sat a white pickup,
Ruggiero recalls. In her sweater, high heels and dress pants, she
worked her way to the foreman's truck. He would only roll down his
window at first.

"You're trespassing," she told him. "You don't have a
permit."

"I don't need a permit," he told her. "I have the lease."

Aruba officials said they told the Ruggiero family on Sept. 2
that they would be drilling on their property.

Ruggiero realized the horses - Nina, a Palomino paint;
Sweetheart, a thoroughbred; and little Willow, a mini she'd given
to her daughter - were staring at her. She began to cry.

She was gathering the horses to move them when her husband
arrived about 10 minutes later.

His rage was like nothing she'd ever seen - screaming, yelling
and swearing in the face of the foreman and, later, at another
worker who laughed nervously at the exchange.

"Something in Tim's eyes looked like he'd gone mad," Christine
said. "They were glazed over, looking right through me, as if at a
target."

She became afraid and got between the foreman and her husband,
asking him to calm down.

Tim Ruggiero relented and went inside the house - the house they
bought in 1994 for $240,000, the house in the country they'd worked
for years to acquire. His wife didn't know, he said, that after he
went inside, he pulled a shotgun loaded with birdshot from the
cabinet and emptied it. He opened a box of shells filled with
buckshot, loaded two rounds in the gun and put extra shells in his
breast pocket.

He paced the kitchen for a long time, his mind racing.

"I never knew before what it meant when someone said, 'I was so
mad I could kill,'" he said. "They violated that trust that I have
with my wife and my daughter to protect them."

He kept pacing until he saw his wife and the foreman sitting in
the chairs on their front breezeway. He realized he needed to
regain control of his emotions and the situation; otherwise, he
couldn't protect his wife and daughter for the long term.

He returned the shotgun, still loaded with buckshot, to its spot
in the cabinet.

Meanwhile, his wife had already decided she would do what it
took to keep things from escalating.

"I was going along with the flow," Christine Ruggiero said. "I
did what everybody else probably did - going along with getting a
new driveway, a new fence, believing when they said the horses
would be safe by a rig. I was in shock, really, telling myself,
'Maybe we'll be OK.'"

She was showing the foreman where a new horse fence would need
to be when she watched him pull a single sheet of paper, folded in
quarters, out of the back right pocket of his jeans. He told her he
needed to make peace - he needed both of their signatures on an
agreement.

As she looked at the paper, she invited the foreman to come into
the house, but he declined. They were sitting in the breezeway when
her husband came back outside. DRC/David Minton A sign made by Tim
Ruggiero rests against the shed covering his family's drinking
water well in Wise County in February. View larger More photos
Photo store

Tim Ruggiero said he apologized to the foreman for losing his
temper. He also told the foreman he would hold the company
accountable for this "new normal" on their land.

The statement would prove prophetic.

Aruba's operations, which have resulted in a series of spills,
excessive emissions and other problems reported since October, have
made the site the first Barnett Shale well head to receive a notice
of enforcement since the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
ended its "Find and Fix" initiative, according to agency spokesman
Terry Clawson.

Four other Barnett Shale sites have since been referred for
formal enforcement action, Clawson said.

Last fall, TCEQ gave Barnett Shale operators about six months to
address emissions problems, including those problems state
inspectors found during several site visits last year. A 300-page
report released Jan. 27, during the middle of the initiative,
detailed elevated levels of benzene - most from 17 parts per
billion to 45 parts per billion - at 21 of the 44 places inspectors
visited. DRC/David Minton "They violated that trust that I have
with my wife and my daughter to protect them," Tim Ruggiero said
about Aruba Petroleum drilling on his family's property in Wise
County. View larger More photos Photo store

According to the National Institutes of Health, people who are
regularly exposed to low levels of benzene can develop severe
anemia, leukemia and lymphoma.

A 2004 National Cancer Institute study of workers in a shoe
manufacturing plant showed that exposure as low as 1 part per
million of benzene in the air was enough to change the workers'
white blood cell counts.

State records show that TCEQ cited Aruba on March 5 for three
air quality violations. Among the dozen or more toxic compounds
measured above screening levels in the Ruggieros' backyard during
several inspections, benzene was measured at levels that "could
potentially contribute to long-term (i.e. lifetime) cumulative
exposure," inspectors wrote.

In a prepared statement, Aruba officials wrote that they
believed the emissions were at levels "protective of human health
and did not interfere with the normal use and enjoyment of
property. We also have taken and will continue to explore steps to
further reduce our emissions."

Aruba paid the couple $30,000 for the surface use agreement they
signed that night.

Company officials also said they built a new fence and a run-in
shed with water, added rock to the road leading up to house and
installed low-profile tank batteries.

Aruba plans to reseed the location and provide landscaping, the
company statement said.

Christine Ruggiero said she tried to stomach the "new normal"
for a month or so, with rumbling trucks, bright lights and the roar
of heavy equipment outside her kitchen window.

But the feeling in her belly turned over the day workers were
helping put up the new run-in shed for the horses and the foreman
turned to say, "We're not so bad, are we?"

She wanted to believe what they were selling, she said.

"But too much of you inside knows," she said, "they're not
telling you the truth."

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881. Her e-mail
address is pheinkel-wolfe@dentonrc.com.

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